In 1979, five months after my seventh birthday, my father crashed his plane into an orange grove and died. Dad, a pilot, had gone up in one of his twin-props with a friend and lost control after some sort of mechanical failure occurred in the skies above Central Florida.

The funeral was closed casket—an uncommon thing for Catholics back then—because my mother did not want people to see the work the undertakers had to do to stitch my father back together. So I never did get to say that last goodbye. Instead, I pondered what my father might have looked like in that shiny box and wondered if, even in a hideous form, he might ever be able to come back.

From that moment on, I gravitated toward stories about raising the dead—ghosts, vampires, any manner of gothic Victoriana. And it wasn’t long

See Full Page